Who needs sleep to bike?
We run on drive, desire,
And sometimes on wine
After a largely sleepless night (Spaniards celebrating fútbol are not to be trifled with!), we headed into the next set of rather-large mountains. Maybe there are better ideas. Anyway, we always have siesta to nap.
The peaks we saw today were crested with turbines in much the way most high places seem to be in Spain. The towns that line the one road leading over them are clearly camino towns: not many people pass here who are not peregrinos, and not many people live here other than those who run the albergues and cafés to service them. It's amazing what grows up around this pilgrimage!
We passed two high peaks today, one of which was the highest peak on the entire camino: 1500m above sea level. The first peak was admittedly more interesting; it was topped with a pole to which people had taped, stapled, knifed, wrapped, or otherwise attached various mementoes of their passage (I actually tied the flowers from my handlebars to it... their crêpe paper was starting to look sad from the abuse of wind during riding). The ground around it was littered with rocks covered in messages in all languages to people passing through. Evan and I left one that noted, "Wherever you go, there you are," with our signatures and hand-drawn pictures of our bikes (sans gear).
Those peaks mounted, we were treated to a nice, long, twisting coast down the side of the mountain. It led through more camino towns and not much else. The town at the bottom, Molinaseca (dry windmill), had a stream running through it to a waterfall. The local game seemed to be to jump in as close to the waterfall as possible and swim away before getting sucked down. A shame we didn't have time to join...
Anyway, we headed down and down into the valley, heading for Villafranca del Bierzo and a sleep at the foot of the next mountain range. The town was in wine country, so we were again treated to drinking wine from <5km away. The albergue we slept in was clearly a pilgrim factory: there were bunked beds lining the attic, cots and mattresses where it was too low for bunkbeds, and generally a whole lot of people milling around at all hours of evening. Hopefully a good sleep before the next climb tomorrow!